Mother of Monsters Update

A few years ago, I was working on a project called Phosophoros, which you can find information about in my blog’s archives.

Phosphoros was decidedly more experimental that Mother of Monsters, which will be an open-world dungeon crawl. Once I have a couple games completed I want to branch out, but for now I think it’s best to stick to formula.

I’m working with a few things to make Mother of Monsters a “play at your own pace” kind of game, in subtle ways. Opening treasure chests rewards you with experience points — which you’ll probably need to complete the game.

I’ll also include some items to avoid random encounters — every battle in the game will be a random encounter — so you can go for a pacifist run, or just explore dungeons as your leisure. You know, whatever you prefer.

Also, there are no forced boss fights and you can run from every battle.

Though I personally tended to complete every battle in Chrono Cross, I admire the game for allowing players to flee from every fight, even boss fights (admittedly some battles were easier to run from than others).

…
Last week I finished all of the planned dungeons for the game, and over the weekend I finished the first settlement the player can visit. I decided to work on dungeons first since the intent was to create a dungeon crawl.

I have plans for about four more settlements.

The game won’t feature anything like cutscenes — that’s not the style of this game. There are NPCs of course, and talking to them reveals information about the story and world — but it’s all optional. You don’t have to talk to anyone.

Pretty much any location you learn from an NPC you can find on your own.

You don’t have to talk to anyone.

You’ll have to talk to the shopkeepers for equipment upgrades, but I guess you could also try and be all hardcore about it and never talk to anyone.

I have plans for multiple endings, and I don’t intend to actually release information about how to find them. I’ll leave that to players.